Response to the Peace and Justice Education Conference, By Jess Kent

Posted on August 2nd, 2010 | Filed under InterViews

The coordinators of the Peace and Justice Education Conference at Columbia University had a daunting task at hand, but also an exciting one. Eric Shieh identified that running this conference without creating space for religion to be discussed and represented would be a "glaring absence". Without having attended the conference, I surmise that their efforts to bring religion to the table shed a different light than expected into the mix of conversation. Hopefully, it pushed the participants to question the role and responsibility of religion in advocating for a faster and firmer push towards peace. Indeed, I believe it is a push- an active force- that we need to set in motion.

The question that Eric posed, "Do we teach violence?" brought me back to my days in Jewish religious school, one day in particular. My eighth grade class was sitting in the back of the sanctuary learning about the Holocaust and one of my classmates asked why we needed to learn about the bad things that happened to our people when things seemed to be so good since then. My teacher responded by saying that violence has a voice and until we learned to speak with it we would not be able to silence it.